Golf star Charles "Chick" Evans, Jr. (1890 - 1979) was not one to sit on his laurels; busy as he was, he sat himself down and penned this whimsical history of golf for the Vanity Fair readers. The essay was titled "The Royal and Ancient Game", which we have broken up into several printable file sizes for your enjoyment. This article appeared not too long after the publication of Chick Evans' Golf Book: The Story of the Sporting Battles of the Greatest of All Amateur Golfers (1921).
Much to his credit, in 1930 Evans had successfully launched a college scholarship program for eligible golf caddies. The Evans Scholarship fund continues to this day and has, up to this writing, sent over 8,000 golf caddies to college.
Click here to read about the American cars of 1922.
"The Golfmobile provides an ideal solution for two new golfing problems: a growing shortage of caddies and a crop of time-pressed golf lovers, headed by President Eisenhower, who frequently uses a Golfmobile to cut playing time in half." "The Tamarisk Country Club in Palm Springs, California was one of the first to employ a fleet of the 'bugs' and now many courses throughout the country are doing the same." This short profile of Byron Nelson (1912 - 2006) was written when the golf champion was at the top of his game. Nelson was indeed one of the grand old masters of golf with many victories to his name (twelve PGA Tour wins). This article serves to illustrate how admired he was by his fellow players as well as his contemporaries who watched the game closely.
Click here to read about the first steel tennis racket.
The attached 1933 and 1934 photos will give some indication as to what golf clothes looked like during the early Thirties. Depicted in the first image are four actors of the Hollywood tribe: Adolphe Menjou (clad in plus-fours), a slovenly Johnny Weismuller, Bruce Cabot and Richard Arlen. Full-cut trousers were the rule of the day, as can clearly be seen in the second photo that was indifferently ripped from the browning pages of "Delineator Magazine", which also shows a smashing linen shirtwaist dress that was worn on the Bermuda links.
The two page article attached herein addresses the meteoric rise of the American golf legend Bobby Jones (1902 – 1971). Said to have been a child prodigy in the game, he made his mark early, winning the 1923 U.S. Open against Bobby Cruickshank (1894 – 1975) at the age of 19. Trophies came to him effortlessly during the course of the following six years and, judging from the question posed above, the golf journalists were right: Bobby Jones was losing interest in the game - he would leave competitive golf the following year. *Look at the Swing of Bobby Jones* Attached you will find a number of black and white images illustrating the general look for 1950s golfers - and if you've been looking for an article that explains the fashion sense of every single retired U.S. President for te past fifty years, you may have found it. The fashions illustrated herein also provide today's costume designers with a sense of how retired crooners preferred to look as well. |